After Michael Jackson's shocking demise, I was watching some slideshows on the web that showed his face changing over the years. I was reminded of cool morphing special effects in movies and wondered if there was any website that allowed me to morph my face into a famous celebrity. Of course, like everything else here at MakeUseOf, it had to be free. Pretty soon, I was morphing myself and my friends at a cool site, [NO LONGER WORKS] Celebrity MyHeritage.

Let's see how it works in 3 easy steps.

Step 1: Upload Photo

In order to save and share your cool morph creations, you do need to register at the site. With 30 million+ registered members and a clearly defined "˜no spam, no sharing' privacy policy, I had no qualms registering with [NO LONGER WORKS] MyHeritage.com.

CelebrityHome

To begin, rather than using my photo for the morph, I decided to use MJ since that was how the whole idea started in the first place. Clicking on the "˜Celebrity Morph' tab takes you to the following screen where you upload your photo.

Select Photo

After you upload your photo, it runs its face recognition magic, and you are presented with the best matching celebrity lookalike.

ScanningFaces

With over 4000 celebrities in its database, the site is sure to find someone you like and look alike! You can browse between a few matching celebrities for your target using the little green arrows. I usually found at least 6-10 choices when experimenting with photographs of different people. I chose another influential African American celebrity idol whose interview of MJ is fondly remembered by many people:

Selected_Oprah

Step 2: Prepare Morph

Click Next to go to the next step, where we prepare the morph. Celebrity Morph automatically sets reference points on the eyes. All you have to do is add a few, so that the morph becomes realistic. Click the "˜+' button to add points, and the hand icon to position them correctly. For best results, choose the borders of the face, the corners of the mouth, and the tip of the nose, like this:

Reference Points

You can choose the kind of output you want using the slider at the bottom: a still photo, a brief video, or a long video up to 150 frames. Click Preview to view the video:

Step 3: Publish Morph

Without an easy way to save and share this with friends, this exercise would almost be pointless. Fortunately, the guys at Celebrity Heritage seem to know this as well, since they've made it very simple to share your morph video on various social networks.

Post Morph

If your preferred network is not there, or you wish to embed it in your own site, the "˜Other' tab gives you the HTML code to embed it wherever you wish. I checked out posting to Facebook, and after the usual authorization process, it was very simple and worked flawlessly. Of course, even if you do not publish it anywhere, the site saves your morphs under your profile. You can create and play with as many morphs as you like.

This can be a cool gift for your friends: take their photos, morph them into a celebrity, and surprise them! You can also use the site to create a Celebrity Collage. Simply upload your photo, select from various collage layouts, and share it. Other features are a look-alike meter to find out which parent your child resembles more, and auto-tagging people in photographs using face recognition.

You might also want to check out these previously featured sites on MakeUseOf:

  • Celebrity Match Up: Find your celebrity lookalike
  • MorphThing: Morph any two photos together into one
  • Yearbook Yourself: Give your photos a retro look

If you want to find out about the real lives of celebrities, check out our list of sites where famous people reveal their other side.